FULL BLEED: AIN’T NO HOME FOR ME
Updated: 2 days ago
It’s been awhile since I’ve done one of these sorts of introduction posts, and I’m catching some new followers. Hopefully a few more will manifest as a result of my interview with Quills and Chills about My Gifts Are Hungry going live. Theoretically that’ll happen by the time most of you read this (but really midnight on September 29th, West Coast time.)
Here’s the link to their channel, should you wish to investigate. They have great guests from horror and other genres, worth your time.
And here's the actual interview with me:
So, yeah. I’m Matt Maxwell. I’ve been writing for [redacted] years, on and off. Mostly on in the last decade or so, but I’ll get to that specifically in a bit. I also take pictures, used to play music in The Roswell Incident (and later as Identify 9 on my own). I’ll include links to all this at the end, don’t worry. I graduated high school in the mid-eighties. Graduated college in 1990. I am old. Don’t let the shimmering vitality and sparkle in the eyes fool ya.
I’ve helped raise two great adults now, even if I can remember them when they took their first stumbling steps. I’ve parented a small menagerie of creatures which stands now at three cats: Moria (aka Khatzad-Dum, aka the Shadow Queen), Ziggy (aka Ziggo, Zig-Bug and Stop doing that) and his brother Star (really Stardust but nobody calls him that.) I’m currently living near Folsom, also near the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas (which aren’t so Nevada these days, but I can remember snow on them) with my wife of 32 years, though were together for six years before that. I don’t talk about this a lot and won’t after this so listen up. She’s got a chronic illness. It’s been a daily fact in our lives for more than twenty years. It won’t get better, though we’ve had some relief in some treatments, but it always progresses. This takes a lot of my energy and focus and will and frankly emotional strength. I don’t always deal with it well, I’ll be the first to admit. There are days that not much past this gets done. I do not otherwise talk about it. Do not ask follow-up questions.
I’ve written and published my own comic books, those being Strangeways. It was a horror-western comic before such a thing was really fashionable. First volume was cowboys and werewolves, second was cowboys and vampires. It sold as well as could be expected. I never made production costs back on them, much less profit. I play with the idea of doing them as POD books again, but then I’d have to finish the third book, that being titled The Land Will Know. This, however, is unlikely as that project was an emotional landmine for me and continues to be low-grade radioactive. It’d need some forty pages of new art, maybe more, haven’t looked at the bridge story that holds it all together. Don’t hold your breath.
I will, however, admit here and on the record that it’s a prequel to Hazeland and some of it has already seeped in, but I doubt anyone but me noticed. Hazeland? What’s that? We’re getting there.
Let’s see. I have two degrees that can’t get me work (English and Social Sciences). I did CD cover art for Bomp! Records and Stan Ridgway (designed his first big website, too), Last Days of May (featuring Karl Precoda of the Dream Syndicate) as well as the art for my own musical projects. I started using Photoshop in 1992 and believe that Adobe is a scummy company for going rentware instead of software ownership but the alternatives for my work are limited or nonexistent. Don’t say “Affinity” because I’ll throw a pie at you. I’ve been taking pictures since I was a kid and if you look around, you’ll see my photos show up in weird places.
I was for a short time a professional effects artist and animator, working on Thumb Wars (if you know, you know), Max Steel and Dan Dare (those being relatively doomed projects with impossible schedules and corporate clients). There’s a handful of almost-projects that I was gonna work on but nobody really cares about them, no matter how cool they’d have been.
Right. Writing. Wrote a fair bit on and off in the 90s and then stopped around 1996, started back up again in… 2008? Now, granted, I’d written a lot on bulletin boards and USEnet and user forums and comments threads and blogs. Some of that is even collected. I’ve had a couple blogs that are gone now, only a few pieces of writing I wish I’d kept. I wrote regular columns on comics for Broken Frontier and the Comics Waiting Room (Full Bleed) and a short lived website for the Isotope Comics shop in San Francisco (under the title School of Hard Knocks, where I talked about writing comics and publishing them.) I read comics for a long, long time, but am mostly out of it now, being pretty choosy about the whole thing now.
Had a short period where I was writing short stories for Blizzard Entertainment, one for Starcraft, couple for Diablo. Only one of ‘em got published. You can find it around if you look some, called “The Teacher” about the hazards of keeping pet hydralisks or something. The pay was real good, but I dealt with three different editors often being swapped mid-project, so that wasn’t great.
Around 2014 I had a couple stories published with Broken Eye Books, “Chunked” and “The Kingdom of Is.” Also had a short story called “A Fifth World” that I wrote for one company, they turned into another company and sent me a free copy of the collection, but never managed to send me the hundred bucks I was supposed to get paid for it. Hey, Radiant Crown, I’m still here. Get at me.
In 2016, I was asked by Broken Eye if I’d like to write a serial novella for them. I said “Sure, I would. Only I’m going to make it too long and generally get carried away because I don’t know if this opportunity is going to repeat itself ever.” They said “You’re the boss.” And so I wrote The Queen of No Tomorrows, which would become the first book in Hazeland. Which I still hesitate calling a series as there’s only two books that really follow hard in one another’s footsteps. You could pick up the others and jump in and be fine. More a setting than a series, really. In fact, the name Hazeland wouldn’t happen until after I published the second book myself.
“Wait. You published the second book? I thought you had a publishing deal,” you’d ask. And you’d be right. I did. Only a bunch of things happened and the publisher and I parted ways. So I put out the second book, All Waters Are Graves, by myself via Kickstarter. And that’s how the other books, Fake Believe and My Gifts Are Hungry, have gone. No publisher, just me. I do the writing, have a couple eyes on the editing but nothing like full line edits because that’s really expensive, do the layout, do the covers (no ai ever because fuck that.) Oh, and the marketing. My favorite part.
Kidding. Marketing sucks. Trying to get covered or reviewed sucks. Trying to get podcast interviews sucks. Paying for ads that make Amazon rich sucks. Paying for ads that make Google rich sucks. Dealing with the constant tide of ai slop outreach messages from fake or impersonated reading groups sucks. That part all sucks.
The writing’s good when it’s going, which isn’t all the time.
I get asked about my writing process a lot. Here goes. Take notes.
I write an outline. This requires a lot of thinking. Too much thinking. Then think some more.
Then I write a narrative document. This is anywhere from a fifth to a quarter as long as the piece ends up being.
Then I start writing. If I’ve done the other steps right, I don’t need to go back and pull out the plumbing and start over, routing around the damage. I generally end up making some changes, sometimes big ones. That happened a couple times with the latest book.
When I’m actually doing the drafting, I’m trying as hard as I can to not be thinking about clever ways to make the scene unfold or whatever. I’m trying not to think at all, and instead hand that off to the night crew, who are working under the conscious layer. They’re pretty good at this stuff, lots of practice. But they can’t work without a mostly-internalized roadmap to steer from. And even then, they occasionally demand turns that I can only accommodate. I’ve learned long ago that fighting them is just going to bring heartbreak. And this has served me well. There’s only been a couple times that I started writing a scene or chapter and realized that “No, this isn’t necessary at all, and it’s not cool enough to keep.”
Yeah, that whole thing of “Murder your darlings”? I don’t believe it. I don’t. I know there’s editors who do. And I know that there’s writers who insist on showing every single bit of research on the page, to the point of making things run glacially slow or even slower than that. That’s stuff I tend to skip. Like John D. MacDonald, I try not to write that. If there’s a scene that you’re dreading to write but is important, then maybe you’re approaching it wrong. Every scene should have something special in it. You can always bury the expository stuff into a series of character interactions, or use that exposition to show not just story events but something new. Really, you can. If you’re writing an infodump, maybe look at why it’s not woven into something much more fun.
That’s just me. And I don’t have a contract right now. I’m not pursuing one, either. I… I don’t really have a lot of nice things to say about publishing except that it helps some people keep writing. I’ve seen too much negligence or willful fuckery to get excited about it. I’ve also done division and realize that a 100k contract over 4-5 years really isn’t all that much unless you’re getting multiple books out in sequence. I also am, frankly, riddled with other demands to my time, note the thing that I talked about way up at the head of this. And while we’re being honest with each other, I like writing what I want to write about, in the manner and voice that I write in. Without an honest voice, a writer has nothing. No. Thing. I see advice about having a “transparent” voice and that’s the biggest load of hogwash. That works for the dudes it works for, but it won’t guarantee you success. I promise.
We’re living in a landscape which has been transformed (derogatory) when it comes to publishing and writing and really any creative enterprise. If you can get along getting paid occasionally and don’t expect a steady stream of income from a backlist that is getting buried under a tidal wave of automated listings (we as writers are not fighting for attention but raw visibility, sorry.) We all have to do what we can to survive it and maybe begin to rebuild it into something more equitable once this current age ends. In my case, I’ve stuck to my lane of writing my stuff, my way and picking up readers along the way as it happens. Maybe you’re one of them.
Hello.
Welcome to the show.
I’ll be with you via the Hazeland books and posts to my website (maybe one day a mailinglist) and bluesky @highway62 and pretty much nowhere else. I’ll try to keep going, even though on some days it’s real love the rope hours.
